Women led Projects get Crowdfunding

Women are outperforming men in number of entrepreneurial ventures of late; a new report from Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) and Crowdfunding Centre shows that across the world women are outperforming men when it comes to raising funds from crowd-funding platform. This clearly shows that female entrepreneurial potential is unleashing. Crowdfunding donors are now preferring and exploring women-led projects by giving them the adequate seed funding, working capital, to raise their enterprises.

While men typically seek higher funding targets, female-led projects achieve a greater average pledge amount than male-led projects. Many findings show that while more men use seed crowdfunding than women, women are more successful in reaching their finance goals than men in all sectors and geographic regions across the globe. While a man may start a business with the vision of being the next Bill Gates/Ambani/Mark Zuckerberg/Zeff Bezos, a woman may start a business simply to gain financial independence and nothing more. Most women become entrepreneurs for very different reasons than men. Women don’t like pomp and show; they don’t glorify their achievements. They simply remain grounded. They have very practical and rational reasons for starting business.

One of the analytical reports shows that over 450,000 seed crowdfunding campaigns from nine of the largest global crowdfunding platforms shows that female-led campaigns were 32% more successful at reaching their funding target than male-led campaigns. Even in more male dominated sectors, such as the technology sector, where there are nine male-led campaigns to every one female-led campaign, female-led campaigns are more successful, and 13% to 10% respectively. The US and the UK are the most thriving countries for seed crowdfunding with the largest volumes of campaigns. In both countries, 20% of male-led campaigns reached their targets compared with 24% and 26% of female-led campaigns respectively.

Crowdfunding is essentially the opposite of the typical approach to business finance. Conventionally, if you want to raise capital to start a business or launch a new product, you would need to set up your business plan, market research, and prototypes, and then shop your idea around to a limited pool or wealthy individuals or institutions. These funding sources included banks, angel investors, and venture capital firms, really limiting your options to a few key players. You can think of this fundraising approach as a funnel. Crowdfunding platforms, on the other hand, turns that funnels on-end. By giving you, the entrepreneur, single platform to build, showcase, and share your pitch resources, this approach dramatically streamlines the traditional model.

Crowdfunding is an unruly innovation which has provided new routes to funding for individuals, startups and growth businesses. It enables them to engage and interact directly with the market and with thousands of backers, supporters, customers and potential partners like never before. Seed crowdfunding is the use of ‘rewards based’ crowdfunding platforms to fund the creation, launch or development of new businesses, products and services where backers pay upfront for a product, service or project. Since its inception, seed crowdfunding’s footprint has continued to spread with the levels of finance raised through the nine platforms analyzed. Women-led projects are preferred by funders because the fact is that women are naturally blessed with certain qualities and aptitudes such as follows:

Women are better collaborators: No matter what type of business one runs, collaboration with others is essential. Business cannot be run in vacuum; it operates in society it therefore needs cooperation from stakeholders and the society on the whole. Sharing ideas, maintaining compatible relations with all and working in harmony is very important for achieving good results, it cannot be done single handedly. Women realize this fact easily. According to a recent study conducted by researchers at the Royal Economic Society, women are in fact much more open to collaboration than men. Be it with colleagues, business partners, suppliers or clients women simply do this better.

Women are more honest about the business: Women prefer sticking to the point, and therefore they open up, they talk about their fears, they are not afraid of sharing their failures because they have less ego attached to the success or failure of the business and they want to address issues and not ignore them. In short women are more open and honest about what is going on, and that makes it easier for others to help. Humanity and business cannot be separated. We all need to run our businesses with much greater consideration for the people we interact with, our employees, our customers, our suppliers, our communities. Women are inherently geared to be emotionally strong. They want to make the world a better place, they want to take care of those around them, and they sincerely treat people with respect. Women are fairer negotiators.

Women are better at getting to the point: Women like to get straight to the point; they don’t really want to beat around the bush. After few moments’ pleasantries, they get to the business point. Men can talk about sport, politics, sport, the economy, sport, the weather, sport and then in the last five minutes of a meeting try to hammer out a deal. Women also make better networkers for the same reason. They don’t really want to sit around talking about anything other than business.

Women appreciate the value of creativity: We live in a world where creativity is a very important commodity. We need to be creative in every aspect of running a business and I think that any business that has a creativity shortage will find it very hard to survive in the coming years. Women tend to be more open minded, in touch with the creative aspects of life and they see value in creativity. Women are better decision makers in stressful situations. Several researchers have cited that women have better ability to make decisions in stressful conditions also. Women bring some unique strength to the table that result in better decisions.

However, the fact is that men continue to use seed crowdfunding substantially more than women and raise substantially more finance than female-led campaigns. This article is written for awareness of women that crowdfunding avenues can be tapped for faster and genuine funding.

Over the course of my life, I have done all possible jobs that one can think of – front desk assistant, telephone operator, clerical work, accounts assistant, inventory officer, sales woman, sales manager, tutor, lecturer, professor, director...etc. The range of job designations and experience of working in diverse roles has given me strength to think, help people, increase customer satisfaction, promote products, and off course build brands. When I look back at my career, in some jobs I excelled, in some I continued with odds. But the fact is that the diversity in my career has strengthened me as a person and definitely enhanced my skills. Every job taught me something or the other.
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Over the years I studied and added some degrees as well. I have a PhD in Marketing Management from University of Pune, a post doctoral D.Litt (Doctor of letters) from Mumbai University in strategic management. I am a Professor of Management Studies with 16 years of teaching experience and have over 20 years industry experience. My core teaching areas are Marketing Strategy and General Management. As a teacher, I have always maintained the academic rigor in my classroom, I have always believed and practiced academic engagement while lecturing, I believe in experiential teaching-learning. I truly believe that education is interdisciplinary; therefore I have successfully guided 15 students for their PhD degree across various sectors in business management which includes a broad base of research coursework coupled with an area of specialization.
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A Professor with 15 years of teaching and 20 years industry experience. My core teaching areas are Marketing Strategy and General Management. While I am a Professor of Marketing and General Management, I have also worked as Director of few Management Institutes in Mumbai.